Posts for the ‘Renewable Energy’ category

Earlier this month, Asia’s largest oil trading hub, Singapore, launched its first electric vehicle-sharing service with 80 cars and 30 charging stations. This will eventually hit 1,000 electric cars and 500 stations with 2,000 charging points.

E-trucks matter because growth in commercial transportation is a key factor expected to keep the oil market on a low but steady growth path out to 2040 and beyond, at least according to most long-term outlooks. If commercial transportation can adopt electrification, it would result oil demand peaking much earlier than most forecasts currently suggest and oil would become a sunset industry.

First, one should be discomfited by that lightning-rod shorthand for certitude; science is never “settled.” Saying so is the antithesis of science. The scientific method by definition suggests a permanent state of open-mindedness, of questioning the common wisdom, of rigorously testing and retesting the hypothesis. Where does one draw the line between acceptance of scientific consensus and blind faith?

New York’s State Energy Plan, self-proclaimed to include some of the nation’s most ambitious 2030 clean energy targets, has perhaps by necessity intensified the discussion of carbon prices in the wholesale power markets, possibly redefining their traditional role.

The growing band of fossil fuel-averse investors gained a new recruit in October — this time a bank. BNP Paribas Group announced that it would no longer do business with companies whose principal business activity is the exploration, production, distribution, marketing or trading of oil and gas from shale and/or oil from tar sands.

The bank also said it would cease the financing of projects primarily involved in the transportation or export of oil and gas from shale or oil from tar sands. In addition, the group will not finance any oil or gas exploration or production projects in the Arctic region.

The Nigerian government has finally sanctioned the development of the Mambilla hydro scheme in Taraba State in eastern Nigeria, on the border with Cameroon. With generating capacity of 3,050 MW, it will be the biggest hydro project on the African continent outside Ethiopia.

A federal appeals court has extended by 60 days the abeyance period for the Clean Power Plan litigation pending the Environmental Protection Agency’s review of that regulation. But in an unusual move, two of the 10 judges on the panel reminded the agency of its statutory obligation to regulate greenhouse gases, indicating that at least some of the judges may be growing impatient with the continued delay in regulating carbon emissions from power plants.

It’s been called Sayre’s Law: The idea that the viciousness of battles in academia is in inverse proportion to the importance of the issue at the center of the fight.

That’s not the case, however, with the conflict that is raging over the issuance of two papers by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS) in the United States. It speaks to the question that many advanced countries are facing as several trends merge and, in some cases, collide: How much of a country’s power needs can be supplied by intermittent renewable sources of energy given trends in lower costs of generation, the pace of technological change in storage and the costs of adaptation? And what are the costs to get there?